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Monday, 25 November 2013

High Mass for the Feast of Christ the King, Sunday 24
November 2013, 11am

Led by: a whole bunch of clergy and servers

Sermon by: Fr Malcolm Aldcroft

Last week I had a hankering for Bach. This week I got to
hear O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht sung
by the choir of St Michael and All Saints at probably the highest mass I’ve attended all year. If it’s smells and bells
you’re after, St Michael and All Saints even eclipses the Tridentine Latin mass
at St Margaret’s and St Leonard’s, and has the advantage of actually including the congregation by processing
around and puffing everyone with incense. It doesn’t half stick in your
nostrils, though. I could still smell it two hours later.

If the Anglican communion is a spectrum, this is the end at
which it looks more Catholic than the Catholics, and to someone with such Presbyterian
instincts as mine it’s an uncomfortable experience to witness the clergy bowing
to a separate little Marian altar and singing Hail Mary, although this bit was
after the mass itself was ended. Nor have I ever heard the Lord’s Prayer
changed to include the blessed and ever glorious virgin Mary, the apostles
Peter and Paul, Andrew of Scotland, Michael and all saints, but that’s what we
got in this version of the 1970 Scottish Liturgy. Excuse me while I have
another little Presbyterian shudder … eeurgh!

The mass was sung, led by a choir of ten, and an organist
who scores top marks for sneaking a few motifs from Once in Royal David’s City into the tune of Crown Him with Many Crowns, as well as singing along to the
prayers. As well as choir and organist, there were three clergy in gold and red
vestments and six servers in black and white vestments, which is quite a high
staff-public ratio considering there were only 37 in the congregation.

Slightly confusingly, although the gospel reading (cue bells
and huddled clergy) was Luke 23:33-43 as advertised in the pew-sheet, the other
readings were from Malachi 4 and 2 Thessalonians 3, and not Jeremiah 23 and
Colossians 1 as in the sheet. No pew bibles were supplied.

The sermon was short and sweet; it has to be when there’s
all that mass to get through. On this the Feast of Christ the King, we were
asked to consider how a king or queen can be recognised without his/her crown
on. One of the men crucified beside Jesus failed to recognise him, and indeed
his majesty cannot be measured in human terms. Oh yes, and it was stir-up
Sunday – last chance to do your Christmas baking.

Soul Searcher has not been baking. Soul Searcher’s mother,
on the other hand, had her cake done a fortnight ago. I’m not sure if I believe
in god, but there’s definitely such a thing as a domestic goddess and I’ve a
long way to go to learn to bake like her. Maybe that’s another project for
2014.

There’s definitely something appealing about the Anglican
mass, incense and Mariolatry aside, and I can see why some people like the
ritual and rhythm and predictability of it. Nothing too challenging in the
sermon, hymns that everyone knows, an hour and a quarter circumscribed by
tradition and familiarity, but still not my cup of tea.

Mind you, I bumped into a friend at St Michael’s, and it’s
only the fourth church this year where I’ve met someone I knew, so that’s two Anglican
churches, a Free Church and a Free Church Continuing – the extremes of the whole high/low continuum. I keep thinking that the
bumping-into-friends hit rate should be higher after fifty churches, but
perhaps I just don’t know enough nice, godly people.

Post-script, Tuesday 26 Nov: actually, now that I think about it, there are two other churches where I've met people I know, both Church of Scotland. That takes the hit rate up a bit, and balances the extremes.

Sunday, 17 November 2013

Soul Searcher was a happy bunny this morning. She met the
big scary deadline (three days early, thank you very much) and for the first
time in many weeks actually took a day off.

So I was in a good mood when I headed into the Hilton hotel
in Grosvenor Street to attend the Edinburgh City Vineyard, a fairly new congregation that’s part of a network
of UK and international churches that I’ve somehow managed not to hear of at all until relatively
recently.

Vineyard has its own record label, which doesn’t mean that
its music is any good. There’s not much to distinguish its praise music – led
by a guitarist introduced only as “this good-looking man” – from the trendy droning
heard at Hope!, Life and other strum-along churches of that ilk, and I’ve said often enough why this
isn’t my kind of thing so I won’t explain why again.

You get a Vineyard CD in your welcome pack, but I’m not adding
it to my iTunes library. There’s chocolate in there too, for those with a sweet
tooth, and even if you’re not a first-time visitor there are doughnuts every
week. It could be a dangerous church for anyone watching their waistline, and
since all those weeks of deadline meeting and near immobility have not helped
mine I really shouldn’t have indulged. But I did.

After 35 minutes of “worship” (definitions of which I’ve discussed before),
it was time for David Hart to deliver his talk on Sharing Jesus: how do we
practically do it? A believer should not assume, he said, that the onus is on
other people to recognise the presence of Jesus in his/her life and to come and
find out more. Rather the onus is on the believer to come out of his/her
comfort zone and speak to others.

And the believer who wants to share Jesus should not do as David
does with the wilting plants in his hanging basket – resentfully pour a bucket
of water over them from time to time and then wonder why it just runs off the
hard surface of the soil leaving the poor plants as thirsty as ever. Instead,
the plants need to be fed little and often, letting the moisture soak in
properly.

He cited a few bible verses (Romans 1:14 and 13:8, and
Matthew 10:8), but there wasn’t a bible reading, which seemed something of an
omission, but maybe they do bible study at other times during the week.

Thankfully, there was no reprise of the music after the
talk. But all the people were very lovely and friendly (about 30 of them, plus
some children in the next room), and if you like this style of worship
they seem to be a close-knit and supportive group of folk. I was invited to
join them for carol singing, which I will have to miss because of a prior
engagement, and that made me realise just how soon Christmas will be upon us
once again.

So, as an antidote to the Vineyard praise music, I listened to
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on my
way to the supermarket – note to self for 2014: must take up choral singing
again – and to Take the Floor on the way back from the supermarket – note to self for 2014: must take up
Scottish country dancing again and work off that doughnut … and the rest!

I’ve never had my door knocked on by Jehovah’s Witnesses – at least, not when
I’ve been at home. But then again, I seem to be off the radar of all the
religious organisations that you might think would want to witness to me, as I’ve observed before.

So at the risk of mixing my metaphors, since the mountain
hadn’t come to Mohammed, I set off to find the mountain, which in this case was
a small hill on Oxgangs Green. If I were trying to sell a property in the
vicinity, I’d try to call it Morningside too, but let’s face it, once you’ve
crossed the Braid Burn you’re in Oxgangs and you can’t really deny it. The
clue is in the street name.

I didn’t (and still don’t) know very much about Jehovah’s Witnesses besides the usual lore … they can’t have blood transfusions, don’t
dink coffee (Soul Searcher can’t live without her caffeine), believe that
heaven has a limited capacity but you can work your way to the front of the
queue, and have inaccurately predicted the end of the
world several times. Actually, their website has lots of myth v. fact information for those who want to find out what
they’re really about.

What I can definitely say without fear of contradiction
after this morning’s experience is that they are incredibly welcoming and
pleasant and all seem like genuinely lovely people. Who would leave such as
these shivering on a doorstep? And they know their bible inside out too, which
I’ll come to in a moment.

The format of the meeting is a talk (peculiar to each congregation) followed by bible study based on the articles in “The Watchtower:
Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom” (which will be the same in every congregation
throughout the world, week by week). There were three hymns/songs, from “Sing
to Jehovah”, which were sung somewhat hesitantly to a piano accompaniment. I’d
never heard any of them before, and sight-singing isn’t my strong suit, but I
did my best.

The talk, given by Brother Leitch from the Portobello
congregation, who admits to once having been knocked over by a hungry
Charollais sheep, was entitled “Never become dull in your hearing”. He asked us
to think about three ways in which animals use their sense of hearing: 1) to
flee from danger; 2) to herd together for protection and feeding; and 3) to
search for food. Likewise, since faith follows the thing(s) heard (Romans
10:17) and because it is difficult to explain about Jesus if you have become
dull in your hearing (Hebrews 5:11), we should be alert and responsive and
should flee (1 Timothy 6:11) from the things that Satan has set in the world to
distract us, such as violent movies and other examples of immorality. The
faithful should also draw comfort and inspiration from the fellowship of other
believers, as did the two Estonian women who made a three-day round-trip just
to attend a meeting. And we should be hungry for spiritual food (Matthew 4:4
and 5:6) – this is where the boisterous Charollais came in; it just couldn’t get
there fast enough when it heard the feed bucket rattling – and should listen to
the call to study and, once studying, listen to the subtle rhythms of our own
hearts and adjust our lives to work on what is lacking, striving all the while
to ignore the siren call of the world that would dash us on the rocks.

All in all, as well-crafted a talk as I’ve heard this year.
Can’t argue with that.

And now it was quiz time. Brother McCracken chaired the
seminar-style study session like a brisk, avuncular schoolmaster, putting me
rather in mind of Robert Robinson, not so much for his physical appearance as
for his habit of addressing everyone by their surnames (Brother Smith, Sister
Jones, etc) as he went round the room inviting answers to the Watchtower
questions on this week’s theme, “Jehovah’s Reminders are Trustworthy”, and
responding to most of them by saying, “That’s right.”

The Witnesses do their homework, I’ll give them that. Copies
of Watchtower were underlined and highlighted and annotated, and almost all of
the fifty people present (as with most places of worship visited this year,
attendance was “about fifty”) answered at least one question, even the wee boy
of about six or seven. It’s an interesting format and it must be effective. No
snoozing at the back such as you might get away with in many churches, and
you’d need to have all that information at your fingertips if you were going to
go out there and make disciples of all nations, which is what seven million
Witnesses are doing – “zealously proclaiming God’s Kingdom in more than 230 lands.”
Quite what constitutes a land I’m not sure. There aren’t that many nation
states in the world, but this time next year there could be one more
independent country to add to the list … if the Lord’s swift judgment doesn’t
come before September 18th, of course.

Would I go to a Kingdom Hall again? Actually, I might, if
only to observe another of those study seminars. It’s something more churches
ought to do, because there’s a whole lot of so-called believers out there who
can’t answer simple questions about their own faith, and it’s unlikely you’d be
able to level the same accusation at a Jehovah’s witness, which might explain
their success in worldwide evangelism.

Could I actually subscribe to what the JWs believe? That’s
another question, and the answer is probably no, but if they ever do come
knocking on my door, I’d be up for a discussion about it.